Communism, McCarthyism, and the New Red Scare

As outspoken socialists gain more influence by winning elections at all levels of government in the United States, the Left and its media allies warn of “McCarthyism” and the “new red scare” whenever conservatives recount socialism’s dismal history in power. This is an old communist tactic that the great student of communism James Burnham recognized at the height of the anti-McCarthy frenzy in the 1950s.

Burnham broke with communism in 1940 and began writing for Partisan Review, a journal of the anti-communist left. In 1953, Burnham cut his ties to Partisan Review over the issue of domestic communism and communist infiltration of the U.S. government and society. In his resignation letter to his former colleagues at Partisan Review, Burnham wrote that the term “McCarthyism” was “an invention of … Communist tacticians” who wielded it as “diversionary semantics” to undermine congressional efforts to investigate domestic communism. (RELATED: James Burnham: the Sage of Kent, Connecticut)

Socialism, to borrow F.A. Hayek’s phrase, is the “road to serfdom.” The Left’s invocation of a “new red scare” is designed to disguise that truth.

The next year, Burnham wrote a compelling book titled The Web of Subversion that detailed the revelations of congressional committees and witnesses such as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley about communist activities in the United States. Today, as openly socialist candidates seek political power at the ballot box with some success, the far Left runs interference for them using similar “diversionary semantics.”

Professor Theodore Zorn in The Conversation warns that “another Red Scare” may be taking over America. Zachary Wolfe on CNN’s website claims that the “modern-day Red Scare is officially here.” The Nation headlines Chris Lehman’s recent piece, “The GOP’s New Red Scare,” complete with a photo of Sen. Joe McCarthy. Columbia Magazine featured a story about a panel of descendants of American communists who warned that today’s “‘enemy of the state’ rhetoric” is reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1950s. Terrence Petty, writing in the Forward, claims that President Trump is fomenting a “new red scare,” which endangers us all, but especially American Jews. Qian He, a sociology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, invoked “McCarthyism” to describe a “pervasive climate of fear” being stoked by the Trump administration and directed at China. Not to be outdone, MS Now’s Michael Steele, in an article featuring a photo of McCarthy and Trump, accuses the president of trying to start a “new Red Scare.” The staff of the Democratic Strategist contends that the “Red Scare has returned to America.” (RELATED: Meet America’s New Un-Americans… the DSA)

Of course, the so-called Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s was based on the reality of extensive communist infiltration of our government and other institutions. Burnham’s The Web of Subversion detailed some of it. Whittaker Chambers gave us an inside view of domestic communism in his masterpiece, Witness. Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh revealed the extent of communist infiltration of the State Department in The Amerasia Spy Case. Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel explored the revelations of the Venona papers in The Venona Secrets. M. Stanton Evans showed the truth underlying McCarthy’s and the FBI’s investigations of domestic communists in Blacklisted by History. Diana West’s American Betrayal further exposed communist penetration of our government and institutions. Even liberal Washington Post writer Nicholas von Hoffman acknowledged in 1996 that Sen. McCarthy “was … closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.”

During the so-called Red Scare, it was revealed that communists and communist sympathizers and agents of influence included high-level Treasury Department officials, OSS officers, high-level State Department officials, and even a White House staffer or two. There were many more in the bowels of federal agencies. Communists infiltrated unions, as then-Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan discovered. Meanwhile, as Paul Hollander detailed in his book Political Pilgrims, non-communist leftist intellectuals envisioned a utopian future under communism.

Today’s socialists, of course, don’t embrace being linked or likened to communists, but we should all remember that shortly after Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917, he exclaimed, “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” And we should also remember the words of Winston Churchill in 1945:

[T]here can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven and the abject worship of the State … liberty in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism … Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils … [N]o Socialist system can be established without a political police.

The most powerful “socialist” country in the world today is the People’s Republic of China, ruled since 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party. It is also the most murderous regime in human history and the principal threat to the security of the United States. Socialism, Lee Edwards wrote, is a “pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political might.” Socialism, to borrow F.A. Hayek’s phrase, is the “road to serfdom.” The Left’s invocation of a “new red scare” is designed to disguise that truth.

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